"For the first time, astrophysicists have measured the recoil - or " kick," in the parlance - resulting from the birth of a new black hole that formed from the merger of two preexisting ones. The international team of researchers measured the ripples in the fabric of spacetime, known as gravitational waves, allowing them to get unprecedented insights into the turbulent dynamics of two black holes crashing into each other."
"The team analyzed data collected by the Advanced LIGO and Virgo gravitational wave detectors in 2019 that appears to record two black holes merging, with the resulting larger one being kicked away at thousands of miles per second. The event, dubbed GW190412, saw a black hole eight times the Sun's mass colliding with another black hole that was 30 times the mass of the Sun, some 2.4 billion light-years away."
""Black-hole mergers can be understood as a superposition of different signals, just like the music of an orchestra consistent with the combination of music played by many different instruments," said lead author and University of Santiago de Compostela professor Juan Calderon-Bustillo in a statement. "However, this orchestra is special: audiences located in different positions around it will record different combinations of instruments, which allows them to understand where exactly they are around it.""
Advanced LIGO and Virgo data from 2019 record a binary black hole merger (GW190412) in which an 8-solar-mass black hole merged with a 30-solar-mass black hole about 2.4 billion light-years away. Analysis of the gravitational-wave signal shows uneven emission that produced a recoil (kick) of the merger remnant, accelerating it to roughly 31 miles per second. The signal mixture varies with observer location because mergers emit multiple superposed modes, so different vantage points record different combinations of those modes. The measured kick could be sufficient to displace the remnant from a gravitationally bound star cluster, though the environment is not known.
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